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With Glenn Beck getting nuttier as his ratings swiftly sink, Bill O'Reilly's getting a free ride. Or maybe not. Lately, science-challenged Uncle Bill, stumped for a comeback when an adversarial guest says something irrefutable, has taken to sputtering "You can't explain that!" So much so that the expression has become a meme, inspiring this viral series of mock posters.
H/T Geekosystem.com
Are we simply no longer able to create jobs in Western economies? Enough jobs to absorb new entrants to the workforce? Enough to replace jobs lost to off-shoring (globalization), to technological change, and to a now entrenched employer ethic (both public and private sector) of driving productivity gains through the expedient of cutting payrolls rather than by creating innovative new products and industries?
We have to ask.
Radical geopolitical change is underway in the world as a result of chronic joblessness. In turn, unemployment and "under-employment" (settling for a low-paying job not equal to one's skills, or an insecure part-time position) is at the root of three decades of stagnant income growth for North Americans. Our middle class, as we've long understood it to be, is on the brink of destruction.
We tend not to address unemployment with urgency, because it's someone else's crisis until you lose your own job. Or your brother does. We also assume, on past experience, that the lost jobs will come back. But that's no longer the case. Economists will tell you that the amount of time spent relying on jobless claims in the U.S. is of a record length, and that has been the trend in each successive recession. Economists will also tell you that the longer you spend without a job, the tougher it is finally to land one, especially one that is best suited to you.
Protesters in Cairo and Grand Rapids, Mich. (Reuters, AP) Click to enlarge.
Some facts:
1. It is chronic unemployment among young adults (15 to 24) that is driving social upheaval in the Middle East and North Africa. It also fuels the discontent giving rise to Tea Partiers and similar movements in Europe. (At the recent Conservative Political Action Convention in D.C., the average age of the largely discontented attendees was well below 40.) Youth unemployment is a staggering 25% or so in Egypt - enough to topple a 30-year-old autocracy. But in Spain it's 40%. In Britain, 30%. In the U.S., 20%. In Canada, 14.4%. (Against a general-population jobless rate of 7.8%.) Young-adult unemployment is a global crisis, as Bloomberg Businessweek enumerated in a recent, alarming cover story.
This is the next leadership generation, of course. And it likely will be the first, in mature economies, to be worse off financially than the one preceeding it. These grads are entering the job market burdened with, in Canada, an average of $18,000 in education-related debt and slender or no medium-term prospects of paying that off. At America's better colleges, tuition alone is $80,000 in a typical four-year degree program. It's noteworthy that Ivy League graduates Michelle and Barack Obama were able finally to retire their student-loan debts only three years ago, on the windfall proceeds of the latter's bestselling books.
Worldwide, there has been an unintended consequence of the money we've pumped into higher education. Most Arab nations, conspicuously Egypt, have for decades been building universities of near world-class stature. China in the past dozen years has built 20 MIT-class colleges. The calamity has been the dearth of jobs for the ever-increasing flow of graduates from those schools, booming China excepted. The curse of youth joblessness is especially pronounced in North America, the Middle East, North Africa and Western Europe.
The bottom line here is that we have educated a new generation with high expectations of job fulfilment that society cannot seem to meet. And this has been the case for years now. Meanwhile, these same graduates are more threatening in than traditional dissident groups in their acute communication and organizing abilities. A great many of them are freshly minted engineers. To say they have the intellectual means to blow us all sky-high is a wild exaggeration. But don't doubt a rising global legion of jobless young adults to overturn the established order out of sheer frustration. They have the motive and means to do so.
2. The middle class has become the underclass. Again, we have been sanguine about this gathering crisis, since the media that reports and comments on such things has not missing many lunches. (Not until the recent death spiral of traditional newspapers, at least.)
Time was, a single "breadwinner" could support a large family. (U.S. National Archives, Reuters)
But here's the salient fact for U.S. policymakers, the one that explains most if not all of what's wrong with America: Over the past 20 years, the average U.S. taxapayer's income, adjusted for inflation, has actually dropped. In 1988, it was $33,400. Twenty years later, in 2008, it was $30,000.
Source: CNN Money
Which would be fine, if the cost of living also had remained flat. But as we know too well, the cost of everything from tuition to energy to health-insurance premiums to even food has skyrocketed in price. None of these things are luxuries.
You don't have to be Dickins to see the problem here: More money going out than coming in, by an ever widening gap, misery.
3. What has caused this gutting of the middle class, the bulwark of U.S. prosperity? The decline of manufacturing, due to off-shoring of jobs to low-wage jurisdictions and technological advances enabling the world to make more steel, cars, disposable diapers and ketchup with ever fewer workers, has pushed 80% of us in North America into the so-called service economy. Service-economy jobs traditionally offer fewer benefits - pensions, healthcare assistance, even corporate tuition subsidies for employees - than a vastly shrunken manufacturing sector did. In the absence of unions for most private-sector service workers (ever here of a union representing accounting-firm employees?), job security has gone the same way as benefits, into abeyance.
In the second half of the 20th century, which saw the emergence of the mighty American consumer economy based on middle-class incomes, collective bargaining ensured that organized workers on average earned 15% to 20% more than their non-union counterparts. But unions and collective bargaining have been under sustained assault since the early 1980s milestone of Ronald Reagan breaking the air-traffic controllers union. Over the past 28 years, union workers as a portion of the total U.S. workforce have dropped from about 20% to less than 12%. And that includes the public sector, the last redoubt of organized labor. Strip out the public-service union membership, and that latter figure drops to 7% or 8%.
"The erosion of collective bargaining is a key factor to explain why low-wage workers and middle income workers have seen their wages not stay up iwth inflation," Bill Rodgers, a former chief economist at the U.S. Labor Department, now a professor at Rutgers, recently told CNN Money. The hollowing out of America's manufacturing sector in a "race to the bottom" among defectors to low-wage China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia and so on hasn't helped. "As we become more connected to China," Rodgers adds, "that poses the question of whether our wages are being set in Beijing."
4. The rise of job-light industries. By the height of the disastrous U.S. housing bubble, corporate finance in its various forms accounting for a staggering, unprecedented 23% of the U.S. economy. Traditionally that figure is about 8%. The financial services industry manipulates numbers rather than creating wealth through the invention of new products requiring workers to make them - heart stents, more durable tires, strong steel alloys, faster and safer commercial jetliners, more efficient power-plant turbines, less energy-hungry appliances, ever more practical solar panels and wind turbines. Increasingly it is the Chinese, Indians, Brazilians and other non-North Americans who preoccupy themselves with such things. Our rewards system in North America has become so skewed that one feels almost a fool to consider a vocation in geology, microbiology, forestry, nursing, civil engineering, teaching or international relations when the starting salary for stock jocks on Bay Street is $80,000, and a Wall Street trader knows she's for the high jump if she's not "earning" $250,000 by Year Three.
The tech boom - lately the boom in personal gadgetry - will not be remembered as on the world's great job producers. Huge employment and wealth was created by the new 20th-century technologies of electricity, cars, consumer appliances, mass media, miracle drugs and commercial aviation. Not so much the tech revolution. Like the parallel global finance revolution, the communications technology that is our current obsession is not a deep wellspring either of jobs or decent incomes. Together, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and eBay have created less than 100,000 direct jobs in the U.S. To be sure, each relies on suppliers that create additional jobs. But the hardware components come from the low-wage Pacific Rim and South Asia, as does an increasing amount of the software. And those software writers who are resident in North America often are small businesses with few employees and few benefits for those workers.
CEOs at traditional manufacturers Procter & Gamble, Boeing, General Electric and Caterpillar (which laid off 20,000 workers in a single day in its Peoria hometown two years ago) look at the staggering revenue-per-employee numbers at Google and Microsoft and, under pressure from shareholders and the spell of compensation consultants, hit on the quick fix of slashing the payroll to boost the bottom line. "Productivity advances are not being made in booming new industries," writes the Observer's Will Hutton, detecting similar corporate strategies on both sides of the pond. "They are being made by laying people off or moving production to low-cost countries in Asia. One way or another, falling workforces in the West are producing broadly the same output." And that, it follows, puts the "squeeze on the incomes of middle-class workers. Our scientists and technologists have not been able to create inventions that can be industrialized at the same pace as they once did."
Cannot, that is, create huge employment as they once did. As Detroit did in the first half of the 20th century, not only creating as stupendous number of jobs (stupendous by today's standards) and with above-average pay, but local philanthropic spinoffs and the demographic revolution of luring tens of thousands of African Americans northward from plantation penury in the South.
It's too easy to demonize the "fat-cat" weathy whose incomes have soared in spectacular fashion since that same 1980 benchmark year when Reagan and his fellow travelers declared war on unions demoted the health of the middle class to the lowest of priorities. For the record, the richest 1% of Americans - those earning $380,000 or more - have seen their incomes soar 33% during the same 20 years in which middle-class incomes actually fell. (This is IRS data.)
As FDR said of the wealthy who loathed him, yes, but there are far fewer of them than everyone else. True, the real crisis is not that incompetent bank CEOs are handed $38 million to leave the building quietly and never come back. The real crisis is that the middle class has been demoted to an underclass.
It's similarly too easy to characterize North Americans as spendthrifts, buying homes they can't afford, and maxing out credit cards. With their incomes stagnant for so long - an unprecedented stretch of U.S. history, in fact - Main Street has resorted to credit. Which in any case has been cheap, also for an unprecedented stretch of time, most recently in order to bail out feckless banks. Sustained low interest rates on bank accounts and on Treasuries and other fixed-income securities, dating from the mid-1990s, have mightily discouraged savings. The Canadian average household savings rate is a pitiful 4.4%, down from 13% in 1990. In the U.S., the savings rate dipped close to zero in the mid-2000s, before recovering to about 3% today as families do what they can to prepare for sudden job loss or a catastrophic health event.
And it's too easy, finally, to cheer on the dissidents in the streets of Cairo and Alexandria without realizing that what they're fighting for is little different in kind than what chronically unemployed and under-employed North Americans seek, but are not yet fighting for.
Some of us imagine that at least China and India are on the right track. Indeed, having wisely shunned "toxic assets" peddled during the global financial crisis, each nation's financial system is remarkably sound compared with those of America, Britain and certain other European nations.
In booming China and India, poverty remains the condition for most people. (Reuters)
Yet while China's economic liberalization of the past 30 years has lifted about 300 million Chinese into middle-class status - a middle class the size of the entire United States - China remains home to the world's largest impoverished population, at roughly one billion people. India similarly can claim a new middle class, of about 400 million. But that still leaves another 800 million Indians in various states of continued deprivation. Can the torrid GDP growth of these nations over the past 30 years be replicated, and replicated again, in order to absorb those currently left behind by the fantastic wealth on display in the high streets of Shanghai and Mumbai?
How quaint the notion now seems of the full-employment economy. The days I recall, when first subscribing to business journals in the 1970s, that the most highly admired CEOs were those who could boast the largest workforces. Later we came to believe - were taught as if by rote - that the full-employment obsessions of Germany and Japan, an outgrowth of economic misery that help spur each nation's fateful dreams of imperial hegemony, were muddle-headed. To this day, German and Japanese employers are much slower to lay off workers than their American counterparts when economic storm clouds gather. Today, social conditions in Germany, world's fourth-largest economy, are far healthier than those of America.
There are sound arguments to be made of the superior U.S. model of expediency in cutting expenses to avoid or at least forestall outright bankruptcy. Japan's lethargic GDP growth of the past two decades owes at least in part to sloth in biting the bullet on featherbedding and recognizing a bad bank loan for what it is and promptly writing it off, as American lenders do.
Caterpillar lays of 20,000 workers, one-fifth of its global workforce, one day in 2009. A thriving Cat truck plant in Suzhou, China. (AP, Reuters)
But what if? What if we took pride again in building so important an enterprise that our biggest challenge was recruiting enough skilled workers to satisfy demand for what we do? What if job creation at least vied with shareholder-wealth creation as a corporate priority, as it once did. Blogger Noah Brier noted recently that debates over which has the superior business model, Google or Groupon, have turned on Groupon's disadvantage in being "so human dependent." (It's required to have a large salesforce to serve its local-commerce market.) Which got Brier to musing, "When you're building a company today you're trying not to create jobs...What if you were to create a company with the goal of creating as many jobs as possible, not as few?"
Well, if you went that route, Frank Capra would rise from his grave and make one last picture about your angelic priorities and heroic contribution to the community. But he won't, so you'll instead lose control of your company to a Connecticut-based hedge fund in a proxy battle.
When James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time first appeared, in 1962, even that impassioned author did not imagine that three years' hence Watts would go up in flames, then almost every other American city. And that among the consequences would be the destruction of inner-city America, no more clearly evident than in Detroit, where the reaction to the 1967 riots was a so-far irreversible "white flight" to the suburbs.
Suburbia brought its own problems, everything from the higher per-resident cost of proving municipal services to thinly populated districts to the spike in greenhouse-gas emissions as the North American population relocated to private-vehicle-reliant communities.
We can continue patiently watching this unsettling social transformation unfold - the mass of everyday Americans getting poorer, suffering an ever lower quality of life. I like to think urgent need for change will infect us, as it did with the launch of Sputnik. That era, mind you, followed closely on the shared sacrifice of World War II, and in the midst of the Cold War - each unifying realities. I'm convinced the urgent change will come, but first in the Middle East, whose population of adult unemployed is expected to reach 100 million by 2015. And later on these shores, where a roughly similar number of us will be resentful and desperate enough at being frozen out of the party underway on the first-class deck to storm the gates.
But will violence once again be our answer, in this new century, to yet another crisis that defies solution only out of insensitivity, misplaced priorities, and inertia?
(Getty Images)
The Globe and Mail reports a surge in optimism among shipping magnates, who are commissioning new tankers, freighters and drilling ships to exploit a renewed global commodities boom, and expanding trade among emerging economic powers including China, Brazil and India.
But neither volatile commodity markets nor the high seas have yet been tamed, as this portfolio of images reminds us.
Wikipedia Commons.
If pride goeth before the fall, the U.S. would have cratered at the time of the Revolution, so convinced were most of the new nation's architects that they had created a new order for the entire world.
My friend Allison turned to me during the latest State of the Union address and said, "Did he just say that?" Obama had just said that America is the most prosperous country on Earth.
Oy.
The peoples of eight nations, according to the latest IMF survey, are wealthier than Americans. In per capita income, Norwegians are almost twice as wealthy as Americans. There's also Australia, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland...
Thomas Paine and Barack Obama: Both effusive in their national self-regard. (U.S. National Archives, AP)
There's never been a greater place than America, Americans will tell you. And they've been saying this since they did us all the favor of joining the community of nations.
In my high school, we took it as a sign of insecurity that a person felt a need to brag. There was no more common a put-down in my youth than to assess someone's boastfulness or bullying as the symptom of an "insecurity complex." And this symptom has characterized our neighbor since propagandist Tom Paine said America would "prepare in time an asylum for all mankind." The line runs through to Obama. In his recent SOTU, Obama gushed that America is "not just a place on a map, but the light to the world."
Insecurity is at high tide in the United States. That, too, is characteristic of America. Periods of despond date from the Republic's earliest days. Time and again these widespread doubts have been shown to be unwarranted as America rose to still greater heights, as in the aftermath of the most recent trough, the stagflation and industrial malaise of the 1970s. Near-frantic reassurance is to be expected in the troubled times, as now, when U.S. economic distress is compounded by the rise of potential superpower rivals, China chief among them.
As on previous occasions since the birth of the Republic, many informed observers are convinced that this time Pax Americana really is in decline.
Here's Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator for the Financial Times and author of Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety, in U.S. journal Foreign Policy's current cover story:
Rivalry between a rising China and a weakened America is now apparent across a whole range of issues, from territorial disputes in Asia to human rights. ...America will never again experience the global dominance it enjoyed in the 17 years between the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991 and the financial crisis of 2008. Those days are over.
Rachman's take on the U.S. has been generally favorable over the years. And, unlike prognosticator Tom Freidman, who latches onto his ideas with the childlike wonder of a boy capturing his first garter snake, Rachman comes gradually to his views and explains rather than expounds. Which makes his essay joining the dots all the more worrisome for American jingoists.
(Getty Images)
Charles M. Blow, the NYT essayist and chartist, is less deft than Rachman in his recent op-ed despairing over a U.S. "empire at the end of decadence":
It's time for us to stop lying to ourselves about this country. America is great in many ways, but on a whole host of measures - some of which are shown in the accompanying chart - we have become the laggards of the industrialized world. Not only are we not No. 1 - "U.S.A.! U.S.A!" - we are among the worst of the worst. ... One of President Obama's new catchphrases is "win the future," but we can't win the future by ceding the present and romanticizing the past.
Here's Blow's accompanying chart, based on the IMF's category of "advanced economy" performance in health, education, job-creation, income inequality and other metrics (click on chart to enlarge):
Narcissism often is most pronounced in the twilight hours.
Think of Kipling's most parochial jottings, as Britain entered the down-slope of its imperial reach. And of de Gaulle's almost pathetic evocations of a greatness that in fact peaked in the 18th century. It's been winter for France ever since its Revolution. The military setbacks since 1789 have been consistent from Napoleon through two world wars to Southeast Asia and Algeria. In the 1980s, Japan finally emerged from postwar humiliation to lecture the U.S. on its industrial decline. More proof of the adage with which I began this essay. Japan promptly sank into a two-decade economic funk from which it has yet to recover, and was this year eclipsed by China as the world's second-largest economy.
And what of those countries with a real claim on sustained robust health and prosperity? We don't hear much from the Australians, Swedes and Canadians. You might think their voices don't carry on the world stage, but that's not quite it. Go to Melbourne or Gothenburg or Toronto and what you notice is complaints among the locals about how their national conditions should and can be better. Those are the places to bet on. In its best days, America has been that way, dissatisfied with its undeniable but still insufficient progress.
Also among those now giving voice to American jingoism is presidential hopeful Rick Santorum, former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, still licking his wounds from losing a re-election contest by 17 points. Santorum recently told a gathering of college Republicans that "America is exceptional, and Americans are concerned that there is a group of people in Washington who don't believe that anymore."
It's been a while since I was last in D.C., but I doubt I'd find even one group there of any influence that dares believe that. Though I will allow that there's a down-at-the-heels Burger King on the further reaches of Florida Avenue whose patrons would like you to know how America, or maybe it's just Marion Barry, let them down.
And here's presidental aspirant Mike Huckabee: "To deny American exceptionalism is in essence to deny the heart and soul of this nation." Spoken like the North American stereotype of a Frenchman.
Yet another wannabe Oval Office occupant, Mitt Romney, has declared that: "Billions of people today live in freedom, or have the hope of freedom who otherwise would have lived in despair, if not for the greatness of the United States."
Recall that in his breakthrough speech, at the 2004 DNC, Barack Obama memorably said that "In no other country is my story even possible."
Really?
How about a playwright helping lead the ouster of an authoritarian regime to become president of the Czech Republic? Or Nelson Mandela? Or Margaret Thatcher, grocer's daughter from back-of-beyond Grantham, becoming the first female British PM, one of the longest serving in that post, and among the most able? Or the two Jewish mayors elected in near succession in mid-century WASP Toronto, one so beloved that the city's main gathering place, the plaza in front of City Hall, is named for him?
America does not have a monopoly on improbable stories. A Georgian named Stalin led Russia to its most recent experience as an imperial power. And of course Hitler was an Austrian. One of the more recent unlikely turns was a Japanese emigre becaming president of Peru.
As a corrective, Georgetown University professor Michael Kazin has this to say in New Republic even while defending, sort of, the deeply flawed notion of "U.S. exceptionalism":
The new country settled by Europeans and Africans became a continental power only by invading the lands of native Americans - killing many thousands and forcing others to adopt an alien culture. The U.S. abolished slavery decades after Britain and France - and did so only after a war in which over 600,000 men died. Both the Filipinos who fought against American colonial rule and the Vietnamese who defeated the world's mightiest military shed a good deal of blood to stop that 'light to the world' from buring its way through their lands.
What's more, the rise of the United States to world power benefitted from exceptional luck. Weakened by disease and inter-tribal warfare, Native Americans on the Eastern seaboard could not long resist the onrush of settler whose demographic supremacy kept growing as they spread across the continent. The splendid isolation of America from the tensions of crowded Europe shielded it from the devastation of every global conflict from the Napoleonic wars to World War II. Blessed by geographic fortune, the United States became the Australia of the northern hemisphere - but with an abundance of arable land, excellent ports, and a cornucopia of other resources. To paraphrase Ann Richards's line about George H. W. Bush, Americans were born on third base yet thought they hit a triple.
My own corrective would be to give a Grade 5 class about the true origins of some of the greatest influences on life on Earth. Originating with non-Americans are the Modern architecture that dominates U.S. downtowns; guerilla warfare; peacekeeping; trains; antibiotics; insulin; the birth-control pill; the first powered flight (Jean-Marie Le Bris, a Frenchman, in 1856 - 47 years before Kitty Hawk); the first modern automobile (Karl Benz, in Mannheim, Germany, in 1885 - 23 years before the Model T); the earliest television networks, in Germany beginning in 1929 and Britain in 1936 (that novelty was launched in America in 1948); the first cellphone network (built by Japan's NTT, in 1979); and parliamentary democracy, the preferred system of governance of most major nations, from Germany to Russia to Japan to Israel.
Planes, trains and automobiles. Not one was invented in America. (AP, Reuters)
America's dysfunctional system of governance has been adopted by none of the scores of new countries created since the U.S. Constitution was ratified. And no doubt that's much to the chagrin, if they were still with us, of Founding Fathers who imagined they were birthing a system of multiple constraints on state power that surely the entire world would embrace. What the Founders perfected was gridlock.
Then there are certain things in which America is without question exceptional among mature economies.The U.S. lacks universal healthcare, even with Obamacare, which leaves millions uninsured. It resists metric measurement (America has only Burma for company on that one). It remains enthralled with capital punishment, outlawed as barbaric in other advanced nations. (The electric chair, shown left, was introduced in 1922). It continues to reject women in military combat roles, a discrimination outlawed elsewhere as a squandering of resources. It suffers an unsurpassed ubiquity of firearms. The Pentagon has an institutional loathing of peacekeeping. "We are the peacemakers, not the peacekeepers," Dubya reminded fellow citizens in his 2000 campaign. (Actually, he said "pacemakers," but that's another story.)
That's an abridged list of U.S. exceptionalisms one frankly associates with backward peoples.
In the continuing effort to delegitimize Obama - no different in vigor and spite than what Bill Clinton endured, and inflicted by the usual suspects - we are meant to plainly see the president's lack of patriotism from his casual 2009 remark that, "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism."
You betcha. There are neighborhoods in Toronto that believe themselves exceptional. (One of them, in the 1960s, even declared itself a republic.) And if you doubt the exceptionalism felt by denizens of theocratic Utah and the race-based societies of Quebec and Israel, and the cultural hauteur of Russia, South Korea and Italy, you have no business being anywhere near the levers of American foreign-policy power.
America has created more wealth for more people than any country in the history of our species. It has invented many things (the silicon chip, the personal computer, xerography, the cellphone, too many medical innovations to count) that have enriched the world. America also has perfected the partially formed ideas of others, and transformed them into things that have improved the way of a life of hundreds of millions of us, if not quite billions.
I would teach that Grade 5 class in order simply to encourage Americans to look outward constantly. As Pennsylvania caramel maker Milton Hershey did in buying the entire chocolate-making apparatus of a Swiss exhibitor at a Chicago trade fair. Hershey's aim was to introduce to Americans an affordable version of what then was an imported European luxury good.
I would have the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers spend a year in Holland to study the floating levees that keep the North Sea from swamping that nation. And then have them rip out the fixed levees of New Orleans, which snap under pressure rather than bend with the rush of sea water. And replace them with a not-invented-here technology that works. (Since Katrina, the ACE have been replacing the broken levees with same type that failed in 2005.)
What Kazin argues for is the "aspirational patriotism" (Martha Nussbaum's term) that Obama articulated before he became president. Taking his inspiration from the hallowed words "In order to create a more perfect union...", Obama talked about a country not perfect, but perfectable. As Bill Clinton did when he said, "There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be fixed by what is right about America."
Americans are accustomed to facing hard facts, like the sudden loss of their Pacific Fleet, and rising to the necessary occasion. By wiping out the malaria that constrained the economy of the U.S. South. And raising money for a polio vaccine by contributing to FDR's "March of Dimes." And comforting foreigners in distress, with the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, and the flotilla of warships off Rangoon dispatched in a matter of hours by George W. Bush to rescue Burmese from floods. Tragically, tens of thousands of Burmese died because the Burmese military junta denied the Americans, soon joined by British would-be rescuers, access to the country.
Just now, U.S. fiscal conservatives, many of them progressives on social issues and foreign policy, are dismayed that Obama will not convey the hard truth that America, in hock as never before, and slipping toward insolvency by mid-century, will have to collectively sacrifice in order to restore the nation to fiscal health. Which must happen if the U.S. is to remain globally competitive and afford to maintain its military power.
It would be a fine thing indeed if Obama did that, made an emphatic call for collective sacrifice. And do so just months after his party was, in Obama's description, dealt a "shellacking" in the November mid-terms. and do as he faces his own re-election next year with a jobless rate sure to still be above 9%. It would be one on of the most extraordinary acts in the history of American politics. I don't think Obama's story will turn out to quite that improbable.
But true patriotism is sacrificing when your neighbors and country require it. And of walking the talk. Of remaining silent, as an individual or nation, as others speak of your virtues, while you focus on actions worthy of those accolades. At his best, and this was mostly before he was elected, Obama was the voice of aspirational patriotism. Of a quest to help his fellow citizens perfect their country, which only by noble example in the conduct of its own affairs could enlighten the world.
Obama perhaps best expressed this in his DNC nomination acceptance speech in 2008 in Denver:
This country is more decent than one where a woman in Ohio, on the brink of retirement, finds herself one illness away from disaster after a lifetime of hard work. {It is] more compassionate than a government that lets veterans sleep on our streets and families slide into poverty.
Americans, most of them, are quick to spot a phony. Yet much of what they've had to say about themselves by way of exceptionalism has been transparently false. Prideful words of a people not quite sure of their place in the world, who assert their greatness rather than live it.
Update
If you're talking economic and political liberty, America's not so exceptional. (Economist)
Matters look worse if we look at the Heritage Foundation and Wall Street Journal's 2011 Index of Economic Freedom, which ranks America ninth, just behind Denmark and well behind our frostbitten northern neighbors. (i.e. Canada)...
If you think the extent of liberty is not unrelated to the rule of law, you may be interested in America's place in Transparency International's latest corruption perceptions index. It's 22nd, which isn't bad - better than France - but not what you'd call exceptional.
Update II
In their 2011 history of the jingoism and exclusionism behind the Pledge of Allegiance, Jeffrey Owen Jones and Peter Meyer nonetheless assert that "No salute is so deeply rooted in the national experience or so intertwined in daily life."
New Republic reviewer Molly Worthen, a doctoral student in religious history at Yale, points out that "This may be so, though countries ranging from India and Singapore to Guyana and Nigeria all have national pledges, and in some cases their schoolchildren recite the pledge every day. Not coincidentally, these countries are states with distinct - and fraught - moments of modern independence. Since gaining sovereignty, all have faced the continuing task of welding age-old foes into a nation.
Worthen adds:
These pledges were born out of national and ethnic insecurity, and the fear that if citizens are not continually prodded to proclaim their unity, they might act on their differences. Democratic citizenship is always a flammable mixture of freedom and coercion. ...
The Pledge perennially pits America's best virtues against its ugliest habits, and too often becomes the totem of a tribe, an emblem of self-worship rather than unity.
Uncredited images: Wikipedia Commons.
(AP)
Ezra Klein thinks that's fair way to regard it.
Actually, the ace WaPo political observer calls America "An insurance conglomerate protected by a large, standing army."
Tough to argue that point, when more than 40% of total U.S. government spending goes to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid - all forms of insurance. Then there's food stamps, jobless benefits and the VA, more state-provided safeguards against widespread distress. And all of it more or less untouchable, for budget-cutters. Along with defense, of course. Which leaves a comparatively small amount for everything else, including debt-service payments.
Instead of riling the public, austerity-mongerers go after the penny-ante stuff - school lunches, PBS, Americorps, the EPA - things that don't have a voice. (Seniors, vets and defense contractors have a voice, issuing from K Street and state capitals where defence plants are located.)
Result: feckless cutting. As Klein has it:
Politicians don’t take the axe to non-defense discretionary spending because they think Teach for America or the food safety infrastructure -- both of which the Republicans are proposing to cut dramatically -- is more wasteful than the Pentagon or the health-care system. They do it because Teach for America and the food safety system is less politically powerful than the Pentagon or Medicare beneficiaries. The budget ends up like the yard of a man who owns only a lawnmower: The grass is trim, but the trees are overgrown and the ivy is everywhere and the gazebo is falling apart. Yet we keep mowing, because that’s what we feel able to do.
H/T Digg
Protesters in Cairo. (Getty Images)
Upheaval contagion migrating to Libya, Yemen, Bahrain. (Sydney Morning Herald, Al Jazeera, Reuters)
Brace for a new pan-Arabism, but this one based on social justice, not ethnicity. (Lamis Andoni, Al Jazeera)
"Revolution germ" will spread throughout the Arab world. (Joshua Muravchik, Bloomberg)
Niall Ferguson's attack on Obama's Egypt response is "deeply unconvincing." (Jeffrey Goldberg, Atlantic) This is your smack-down of the week. And Ferguson is a pseud richly deserving of one, being prominent among the many Brits seeking a vicarious thrill in urging a U.S. Iraq invasion to relive Britain's lost imperial glories.
Environmental activist in the Ecuadorian rainforest. (Reuters)
Ecuador judge fines Chevron a staggering $9 billion for rainforest damage. (Time)
In all but name, English has become India's official language. (Manu Joseph, NYT) "Almost all advertising billboards in India are in English. There is not a single well-paying job in the country that does not require a good understanding of the language. Higher education here is conducted entirely in English."
Ken Jennings cracks his knuckles before a practice round with Watson. (AP)
Jeopardy! genius Ken Jennings on having matched wits with Watson. (Slate) BTW, "Watson" wasn't inspired by the Sherlock Holmes chronicles. The Thomas Watsons, father and son, were cofounders of the modern IBM.
Watson beats out human Jeopardy! challengers, but identifies "Toronto" as a U.S. city. (Toronto Star, Time) The question, answered correctly by Ken Jennings, was which American city's biggest airport is named for a WWII hero, and second-largest is named for an WWII battle? Lt. Commander Edward "Butch" O'Hare, USN, was a WWII flying ace; and Chicago Midway International Airport is named for the U.S.'s epic Pacific victory in the Battle of Midway. Toronto's waterfront airport is named for a wartime flying ace, Billy Bishop, but he fought in WWI.
Justin Bieber. (Grammys handout)
Canadian teen heart-throb-turned-instapundit Justin Bieber, rejecting U.S. citizenship, says "You people are evil," citing dysfunctional American healthcare system. (Time, HuffPost)
U.S. colleges finding imaginative, successful methods to curb binge drinking epidemic. (Sue Shellenbarger, WSJ)
Why isn't Wall Street in jail? (Matt Tabbi, Rolling Stone) Tabbi did the unjustly acclaimed evisceration of Goldman Sachs last year, riddled with errors. But here's another MT rant for your delectation on the chance it, too, becomes water-cooler talk.
Graphic designer Lydia Leith's tasteful barf bags for the Royal Wedding. (HuffPost) Her "throne up" is a nice touch.
Rumsfeld, flogging his memoir, calls Oakland Raiders "evil" in FT interview. (SF Weekly) In a reality-based world, Dubya, Cheney, Rummy, Condi Rice, Ari Fleischer et al would be forced to sit in a small windowless room with four white walls and Matt Tabbi.
Winnipeg dating service won't match smokers but brings folks with genital herpes together. (Canoe)
Zinc lozenges may be a better cold remedy than even chicken soup. (Tara Parker-Pope, NYT)
Inception may be Oscar's only chance to reward originality. (Eric Eisenberg, CinemaBlend) In the Best Picture category, eight of the 10 nominees aren't original projects, but adaptations, sequels and true-life tales. Which leaves Inception and The Kids Are All Right. Of those two, Inception lacks the boost of studio lobbying of Academy voters.
Scene from Inception, one of this year's Best Picture nominees. (Studio handout)
David Olive is a business and current affairs columnist at the Star, which he joined in 2001 after stints at the Globe and Mail, National Post and Financial Post.
"If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion."
- George Bernard Shaw
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